We Shouldn’t Let the Racists Own the Vikings

When I set out to
write my novel The Half-Drowned King about Viking-Age Norway,
I found only a few other pieces of fiction about Vikings, including
Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Chronicles, and Juliet Marillier’s
Wolfskin. Even the non-fiction written for a general audience
was minimal enough for me to read it in a few months and then move
onto scholarly works. However, in the last few years, Viking and
Viking-inspired fiction has gained popularity, with TV shows like
Vikings, The Last Kingdom—a television adaptation of
Cornwell’s series, and Game of Thrones, which borrows
elements of Viking culture for both the Stark and the Greyjoy
families.

Writers began to
mythologize The Viking Age (793 to 1066 AD) almost as soon as it was
over. Icelandic Saga writers like Snorri Sturlsson writing in the
early 13th century mined the Viking oral tradition for his works. The
Danish monk and historian Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1150 – c 1220 AD)
also wrote fanciful tales of the Vikings purporting to be history. In
a newly Christian world, Vikings stood for the pagan past, both more
exciting than the present, but also full of sin, violence, and
unnatural women.

In Victorian
England, artists and writers put the medieval west on a pedestal for
subtly and not-so-subtly racist purposes, imagining the period as a
golden age for white Europeans. Though racism as an ideology was an Enlightenment-era invention, Vikings and ancient Germanic peoples
were part of this, with Wagner’s operas and the publication of
Donald A. Mackenzie’s Teutonic
Myths and Legends, in which the horned helmet was first
depicted (it has no basis in reality).

This interest in the
medieval past took an even uglier turn with Germany’s Nazi party in
the 1930s and 40s, which used runes and Germanic symbols in their
uniforms, many of which were adapted from pre-Christian Scandinavian
mythology and artifacts. The Nazis were attracted to the vision of a
Germanic warrior as a man without either physical or sentimental
weakness, whose women were strong in their own way, but closely tied
to house and home.

There remain some
very dark sides to mythologizing the past, and many
today who idealize the Dark Ages, do so to promote anti-democratic
ideas and racism. However, looking at the past to see our
similarities to people separated from us by hundreds of years is
valuable and can help us find commonality with people who have
different cultures today. If we cede the cultures of the past to white supremacists and Nazis, then we concede that their interpretation of the past is accurate: there was a racist golden age that we might return to. If, on the other hand, we
portray the past as complex, and the people in it as flawed and
varied as we are today, then we provide a counter-argument that
values all humanity.

The rise of “nerd
culture” over the past fifteen years is one of the main
contributors to the rising interest today in fiction about Vikings.
The same people who love superhero comics often read high fantasy
novels, many of which, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings,
are set in pseudo-medieval worlds that have their roots in
Anglo-Saxon literature and the Icelandic Sagas. It also seems to be
no coincidence that interest in Viking tales has risen at the same
time as an interest in post-apocalyptic dystopias. The conveniences
of the modern world and the dangers of global warming, lead to a
preoccupation with fears about what might take the place of our
current technological golden age. We can imagine bleak futures by
looking at how humanity managed in the past.

My desire to write
fiction about Vikings began with wanting to understand the history of
my ancestors, how I ended up where and who I am, by looking at the
chain of culture and tradition, passed down, altered, complicated
over the centuries. I wanted to know how different my ancestors were
from me, how much the same.

The Vikings are best
known for their overseas expeditions, the raiding trips that took
them as far as Constantinople, and saw them sacking Paris twice.
However, their politics at home were just as interesting. At the time
of the Viking invasions, Scandinavia was undergoing a major political
change, from small districts governed by elected kings, to
consolidated power under a high king of a whole country. Local kings
were demoted to jarls, and the high kings’ power became at least
somewhat hereditary.

Harald Fairhair
(born c. 850) is considered to be the first king of Norway, and
according to Snorri Sturlsson’s mythmaking, also the impetus for
the founding of Iceland, as those families that did not want to put
themselves under the power of a high king fled overseas to settle the
largely unpopulated island. Iceland was established as a
proto-democratic government with a parliament.

Ninth century
Norway’s political upheavals forced people at all levels of society
to weigh the value of freedom from the taxes and demands of a high
king against the security of a wealthy king with an army who could
protect them and enforce his laws. These questions have changed their
shape, but remain relevant today, as the US frequently weighs the
desire for freedom—from surveillance, or to own firearms—against
the desire for safety from terrorists or our own neighbors.

I was interested in
Vikings for many reasons: I wanted to write about battles and
sword-fights, dramatize the people who believed in gods like Odin and
Freya, and examine what it meant to be a good person in a culture
with very different values from our own. One of the appeals of
writing historical fiction is exploring universal human questions in
a different setting, with different rules. As long as we remember
that no era in human history has been without injustice and hardship,
or without people trying their best, we can avoid mythologizing the
past, and learn from it instead.